Radiofarda – After days of defiant statements, Iranian officials have relented to a decision by the Asian Football Federation to send their teams to “neutral” counties for championship games, following the downing of a Ukrainian airliner earlier this month. Leaving aside their initial threat to boycott the Asian Champions League, Iranians backed down yesterday and declared that they had reached …

Radiofarda – Recent reports on social media say the Islamic Republic of Iran has removed the option for “other religions” from the new application forms for the Smart National ID cards. Therefore, in the past several months, Baha’i citizens have been denied obtaining the ID cards. Article 13 of the Islamic Republic Constitution stipulates that “Zoroastrian, Jewish, and Christian Iranians …

Radiofarad – Turkish Trade Minister Ruhsar Pekcan on Thursday said sanctions on Iran, one of Turkey’s major trade partners, have significantly affected Turkey’s exports to the country. However, total Turkish exports in 2019 grew by more than 2% in comparison with the previous year. Speaking to Turkish broadcaster BloombergHT on the sidelines of the 50th World Economic Forum in Davos on …

Radiofarda – European powers will not take steps to trigger international sanctions on Iran, ending the 2015 nuclear agreement, as long as Tehran slows down the expansion of its nuclear work, the Wall Street Journal reported January 23. This can lead to new tensions with Washington that reportedly pressured the European to get tougher with Iran in the past few weeks. Last …

Radiofarda – Addressing world leaders on Thursday during the World Holocaust Forum in Jerusalem, the U.S. Vice President Mike Pence said the world should stand strong against Iran as the “leading state purveyor of anti-Semitism” while the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu saluted the U.S. President Donald Trump and Vice President Pence for confronting “the tyrants of Tehran”. Netanyahu compared …

Radiofarda – The spokesman of Iran’s Anti-Smuggling Task Force, Hamid-Reza Dehghaninia, on Thursday said according to the estimates of several state bodies and the Parliament two-thirds of the home appliances and electronics sold in Iran last year were smuggled goods. Dehghaninia said the value of home appliances and home electronics sold in the country during the said period (March 21 …

Radiofarda – Leaders of Iran’s reformist parties say the results of the upcoming parliamentary elections will come as no surprise as nearly all of the well-known reformist candidates have been disqualified by the hardliner-dominated Guardian Council. They said at the end of a meeting on Wednesday January 22 that unless there is a meaningful revision in the results of the …

Radiofarda – The Islamic Republic Minister of Education’s comments on Tehran helping to reconstruct Syrian schools destroyed in the war-torn country has triggered a widespread negative response on Iranian social media. The Minister, Mohsen Haji Mirzaei, who arrived last Tuesday for an official three-day visit in Damascus, said that Iran is prepared to build thousands of schools in Syria. “Iran-Syria …

Al-Arabia – A second term of US President Donald Trump would be “too much for [Iran] to bear,” Chatham House Director Robin Niblett told Al Arabiya on the sidelines of the 2020 World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland. https://vid.alarabiya.net/2020/01/23/robincorrectab146671/robincorrectab146671___robincorrectab146671_video.mp4 “Iran is under enormous pressure. We know internally the policy of maximum pressure is creating pressure for the government,” he added. This …

RFL/RE – The United States has imposed economic sanctions on four energy firms that it accuses of helping to move oil exports for the Quds Force of Iran’s elite Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). The sanctions announced on January 23 come three weeks after U.S. forces killed the commander of the Quds Force, Major General Qasem Soleimani, in a targeted …